SEO Basics
Written by on September 9, 2009 @ 12:04 PM.
We design a lot of websites, and there’s one thing our clients are always asking about... SEO.
SEO basics boils down to two things: On-Page Optimization and Link Building.
On Page Optimization
On page optimization is about getting the right keywords on your site and getting them in the right positions on your page.
The Right Keywords
Great keywords have two qualities. 1) Lots of people are searching for the terms, and 2) the terms bring people to your site who are actually interested in what you have to offer. If either of these conditions is missing, you don’t have a great set of keywords.
For example, the keyword phrase “healthcare” gets millions of searches every month. If your golf pro shop ranked high for that keyword phrase would get millions of views. Unfortunately, most of those visitors would not be interested in your pro shop. Even those who enjoy golf wouldn’t be interested because they’re searching for healthcare at the moment.
On the flip side, if you target the phrase “callaway golf club clone” as your keyword phrase, you’re definitely targeting the right group of people, and you might even rank #1 for this phrase. The problem is that no one is searching for it. If no one is searching for the term. You get no traffic.
You need to find a nice balance between these two factors to have an effective set of keywords.
The Right Positions
If you search the internet looking for stuff about keyword positions, you’re likely to come across the term “keyword density.” There are many advocates that say 3 to 5% of the words on your webpage should be keywords. Others say density isn’t a factor, placement is the key.
The debate on whether keyword density is a factor in SEO continues, but one thing all SEOs agree on is that you need to have your keywords in the following places:
- Page domain or address
- Title
- Meta description
- Headers
- Image alternate text
- Bold face
- Body of the text
- Links that link to the page you’re optimizing
You need to be careful not to stuff any page with keywords though. If a page reads like it’s optimized, it’s over-optimized.
Link Building
Link building, or off-page optimization, is one of those SEO basics practices that many people don’t do. It’s definitely the more difficult of the two factors of SEO (on-page and off-page). However, it’s the more critical of the two.
Too many people think they can do some keyword optimization and their page will climb to the top of the search engines. That’s just not the case. 25% of SEO is on-page optimization. The other 75% is link building.
Link building is the process of getting other pages to link to your website. Why is it important? Because every link to your website is like a vote of confidence in your website, as far as the search engines are concerned. More votes equals higher search engine rank.
A word of warning about getting inbound links though. Don’t think you can buy a couple hundred links to your site. There are several reasons this won’t work.
- Search engines don’t like purchase links and they’ll either penalize your site or ban it altogether. They want to see it happen naturally.
- If 200 links to your site appear in a single week (and you site isn’t cnn.com), that’s a red flag for the search engines.
- Search engines are good at finding and shutting down link farms. Chances are your purchased links will only be active for a couple hours anyhow.
Where should you get links:
- General directories
- Niche directories
- Blog rolls
- Blog post contents
- Article distribution
- Blog and forum comments
- Websites in your industry
In a natural state, you put up a website with good content and naturally occurring keywords. Over the course of several years, people stumble across your website, like it, and link to it. That’s the natural course of events for a website.
All search engine optimization does is speed up this process. We take what happens naturally and make it happen much quicker. This gets you on the search engine map faster than would ever happen naturally.
There is a lot more to SEO than this, of course. But these SEO basics will help you understand the process of SEO. For more information on SEO basics, you can download our white paper on search engine optimization.
